


A Fire Infolding Itself

by vibishan



Category: Priest (2011)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 20:36:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vibishan/pseuds/vibishan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are different kinds of brothers. Priest has nothing left but this, wanting something his thoughts skitter away from. The truth is plain only to those who have eyes to see.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fire Infolding Itself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heeroluva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heeroluva/gifts).



> I suppose, if you were as repressed as the boys, this could easily be read as gen. It's pre-slash to me, though, no matter how tragic that is.
> 
> Happy Holidays, heeroluva!

His talent comes late, but strong. Inexorable, like the blasting wind of a sandstorm howling around the pitiful, stubborn shack of the man he used to be. It’s that part of him that curls tight fingers around his rosary beads and remembers the wisps of Lucy’s hair, that feels wary when the monsignors tell him he will be the leader. He has always been a rough man, a stern man, a taciturn man, and he knows that fighters do not take well to newcomers jumping above them.

But priests are different. Every one of them is a leaper, soaring above the heads of ordinary men with a spring of calves that feels as light as specks of dust in the sun.

They see the way he moves when the Lord is with him, deep clear eyes that take in everything, and they nod like docile lambs, following each clipped order and unspoken request. There is no resentment, no chafing, no selfish egos. He wonders if that is why their names are all expunged, or if it is the other way around.

One of the others, limbs still faintly gawky with adolescence when the indomitable precision of the hunt is not upon him, reminds him of a Owen, just a little, although he cannot put into words quite how – perhaps it’s simply his age. Or perhaps, he considers later, it’s that the grooves of loss are not carved as starkly on him as the rest of them.

“How old were you, when the clergy found you?” he asks one morning, as they check the gyro mechanisms in their cruriken before sunrise. The other priest smiles – not widely, but he’s the only one of them who shows emotions, really.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “Small. I don’t remember much before my ordination.” He flips one of the cruriken into the air, warm brown eyes fixed on the arc of it, the moment when it bristles into blades, then snatches it fluidly back. “Why?”

He knows that the others pity him for the life he gave up, the ache where Shannon used to rest her cheek against his sternum as they caught their breath, but for a moment he feels a surge of sorrow for his comrade. It doesn’t show on his face, and the young priest keeps gazing back at him, steady and inquisitive. He shrugs one shoulder, because it is easier than finding words to fit an answer, and his companion turns back to his weapons, content with the silence; they have killing to do.

It is hard to explain, even to himself, what the earliest battles feel like: exultant and harrowing, effortless and overwhelming at once. Power spills out of him, rips him open, slips between his fingers like white-hot grains of sand, too much to hold. The training helps him polish the jagged edge of death frenzy into something more smoothly purposeful, deliberate and focused, but he never quite loses the feeling of channeling the sun through a single flimsy lamp wick. There’s no space left for himself in the conduit, just a well-honed hollow, a dry riverbed between each deluge of blood.

All the priests are like that, faceless as smooth worn stones under their skin. (Except for that one, the one who smiles, the one who murmurs the occasional somber or swaggering remark before they begin, comments here and there with no strategic value at all except to provoke a quiet response, to remind them that they are human as well as priest, that humanity is what they slaughter for.) Then they move, untouchable dervishes on battlefields that seem as vast and unconquerable as the pits of Hell itself. There are so very many vampires, and for every dozen they strike, smite, slice open, another hundred screeching kindred spawn and lunge for them.

In a very small, private part of himself, carefully tucked away like a shelter door locked under the sands, he starts to think of the younger priest as another little brother. They practice with each other more than they need to, dancing weightless in the air, fingers passing close enough to almost feel the warmth of another body as they pass a knife between them.

He does not smile, but he lets his eyes linger on the dark line of hair inscribing itself along the young man’s jaw like charcoal dragged across unfinished wood. He breathes slowly as he listens to the deepening voice settle into itself during scripture readings.

Sometimes, when they find stragglers, insufficient waves of vampires to offer any challenge to them, he will order just one priest to slay them all, while the others stand and keep vigil. He is scrupulously even with these assignments, but he watches most keenly when it is that one’s turn. _The Lord roars out of Zion and thunders from Jerusalem_ – yes, he thinks warmly, yes.

But other nights, they _are_ challenged. Nights when speed and grace and righteous apotheosis are not enough to match the sheer, vicious _numbers_. Sometimes, even with every hair’s-breadth of possible fighting unfolded in the mind’s eye, there are no paths that leave them unscathed.

They say no psalms of lamentation, they do not think themselves abandoned, they never admit that the order was conceived as a last resort. Above all, they do not take their losses in vain.

He tends to his brother-in-arms himself, dabbing flesh-stitching paste into the deep gouges rent into the other priest’s leg. The bite marks are ragged and raw, offering a glimpse of scored bone before he binds them up. He feels fingers in his hair and almost jolts, only the priestly poise keeping his hands gentle.

“Your hair is so light,” his wounded brother murmurs, voice like meandering wind, eyes glassy from harsh synthetic alcohol. “Like a halo. You’d look good on a Church laser-etching. Avenging priest with his, his holy light. And pretty hair.”

“You’re babbling,” he observes wryly, and does not push the touch away.

“Synth-A makes me feel fuzzy,” he mutters, with just the faintest sulky tone, and the priest’s lips quirk for the first time since he got his tattoo. “S’not like wine at all.”

“No, it’s not,” he agrees. Clean, apply stitching agent, bandage. It comes awkwardly at first, like rusty gears creaking back into motion, so different from patching Owen up after a scraped knee or a forehead run afoul of a protruding pipe, but as he finds the motions, they come easily.

Strong, calloused fingers stroke his cheek lightly, and the priest is suddenly struck by the realization that this is the most of the other man’s skin he has ever seen – the most of _anyone’s_ skin he’s seen, save Shannon’s. His throat is dry.

“You should keep still,” he says. “Not jostle it.”

“Stay with me.”

He doesn’t know how to deny it, such a simple, plaintive request. He nods and packs up the small medkit, then fits himself carefully onto the small pallet with his fellow priest, arms cinching tightly around his stomach to hold him in place. His friend shudders very faintly, then finally relaxes, all the pain-borne tension that lingered and clung to him through the alcohol haze finally draining away, like smoke vanishing in the open sky outside the cities.

The priest shudders faintly too, overwhelmed by the warmth where they touch, the simple press of weight, the soft rhythm of weak breaths. He hasn’t had anything like this since he left his life, pure physical comfort spiced with a hint of something earthier. He presses his face into the back of his patient’s neck, breathing in the smell of him, desert sand and sweat and blood and weapon oil and musk, and the priest feels alive in his body, tingling and connected to the tips of his fingers and every inch of his skin, in a way that is the exact opposite of the perfect detachment of battle but just as visceral.

“Sometimes you make me think of my brother,” he confesses, mouth pursed with thin lines of guilt, and he is not sure whether the admission is to help stave off this feeling, or strengthen it.

The man in his arms, a world away from Owen drawn pale with nightmares climbing into his bed for bible stories of lions and angels, laughs. The hearty sound of it curls in the priest’s chest like a cat, soft and languid and clawed, content for the moment to rest and purr.

“We _are_ brothers. That’s how being in the order works, remember?”

“Right,” he says, and the warmth in his skin seems to settle, percolate through the parched earth of him and settle in his bones. Brothers, but a different kind of brother. No less of an abomination, but it helps him breathe easier anyway.

They stay that way until his brother slips away into much needed sleep, and then – he does not let go.


End file.
